Democrats Weigh Restricting Private-Sector Use of Facial Recognition
Caleb Watney, a fellow for emerging technologies at the center-right R Street Institute, largely agrees that the market can sort out the more intrusive private-sector uses of facial recognition.
“There’s certainly some weird and hard questions about when people aren’t clearly opting in,” Watney said. “But for a lot of consumer-technology applications, like photo storage on the cloud or social-media networks, or which iPhone you’re using, I think consumers have plenty of choice. And that’s a powerful deterrent.”
Watney scoffed at some of the advocacy community’s rhetoric around the technology, suggesting any claims that facial-recognition technology is as dangerous as plutonium are little more than sloganeering.
“They’re painting with too broad a brush,” he said. “They’re taking the worst-possible-use cases they can imagine and then saying that is the entire category.
“As with most emerging technologies, I think the best way to handle it is regulation on a case-by-case situation,” Watney said, arguing that things like the use of facial recognition to unlock smartphones helps preserve privacy rather than undermine it.
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